Heart of Stone
by Morrigan428
Summary: Summarizing this story is hard, all I can say is that it deals with time-warping and a romance that will effect the future of many...


WARNINGS: Non-yaoi, LIME, angst, humor, sorta AU, OOC, OC, in short a bit of everything.  
  
Archive?:Ready to be archived, so yes.  
  
HEART OF STONE  
  
by Calla  
  
Beneath the white fire of the moon  
  
Love's wings are broken all too soon  
  
We never learned hurt together, hurt alone  
  
Don't you sometimes wish your heart was a heart of stone?  
  
We turn the wheel and break the chain  
  
Put steel for steel and laughed at pain  
  
We're dreamers in castles made of sand  
  
The road to weed on is overgrown  
  
Don't you sometimes wish your heart was made of stone?  
  
Look at the headlines  
  
Big crowd at the crazyhouse  
  
Long cue for the joker's shoes  
  
Ten rounds in the ring to love  
  
Do you lose and win or win and lose?  
  
We pray like mercy in the night(Lay me down, wash away the sorrow)  
  
Caress my soul and set it right(Lay me down; show me your tomorrow)  
  
Summer tears, winter after low winds blow  
  
Don't you sometimes wish your heart was made of stone?  
  
Mercy, mercy!  
  
Wish your heart was a heart of stone!  
  
Get the picture?  
  
No room for the innocent  
  
Big season in Lonelytown  
  
Knocked out of the ring by love  
  
Are you down and done?  
  
I asked the river for a sign(In my dream, we belong together)  
  
How long is love supposed to shine?(In my dream, diamonds are forever)  
  
But you and I, we hurt together, hurt alone  
  
Don't you sometimes wish your heart was a heart of stone?  
  
Mercy, mercy  
  
Wish your heart was a heart of stone  
  
With a heart of stone you'll be well protected  
  
Don't you wish sometimes your heart was made of stone?  
  
With a heart of stone, love's not resurrected  
  
Wish your heart was a heart of stone  
  
Wish your heart was a heart of stone  
  
With a heart of stone you'll be well protected  
  
Don't you wish sometimes your heart was made of stone?  
  
With a heart of stone, love's not resurrected  
  
Wish your heart was a heart of stone   
  
-Cher The Night's Protective Veil  
  
  
  
In the darkness as lovers we meet  
  
Just as two hidden ships pass in the galaxy's starry light  
  
Masking themselves under the night's protective veil.  
  
To others, each of us unwilling to speak  
  
Unwilling and fearing to show what we feel.  
  
Our every kiss speaks of violent passions untold  
  
But kept in a gentle lover's grasp.  
  
How can it be?  
  
You are my most deadliest of enemies, yet the most gentle of all lover's souls.  
  
Our love is gentle in contracts to the violence that may pass.  
  
Forgetting for this time that it is dangerous for us to be together.  
  
A danger like two fires meeting and joining  
  
Only burning stronger upon touch  
  
Neither knowing where it all started or where it will end  
  
Knowing only to burn.  
  
We whisper to the other "touch me", "trust me"  
  
Words neither of us knew we could completely learn.  
  
Quietly while the moon is the only silent witness  
  
We tell each other our secrets- fears, pasts and dreams  
  
Things we only thought would be kept between ourselves and the night  
  
In all the daytime we hide who we are, what we truly feel  
  
Making our only true friend the night's protective veil.  
  
-Rachel Miller (2000)  
  
Prologue 9 years after Endless Waltz  
  
I stared up at the ceiling of my room. I had been laying here in bed,tossing and turning for hours, but always ended up to staring at my apartment's ceiling. For the thousandth time that night, I went over my checklist of what I had to do when I got up. I turned on my side. I need sleep. I want sleep. If I sleep I won't be able to think about it. Only I know once awake I will.   
  
My past always occupied my thoughts when I couldn't sleep, or when I first woke up. My time when I had piloted a Gundam. Of my fellow pilots. We had promised in some way or another to keep in touch. But we never really did.  
  
In fact, the only one I had ever heard from was Quatre. Only because I had made a point to stay in contact with him.I didn't remember, and still don't, why it was so important that out of all the pilots, that I know what happens to him. I thought about what I had heard, found out, or could recall was the last thing that happened to them all.  
  
All the pilots. Wufei had just gotten remarried to Sally Po.  
  
Relena and Heero had been married for years now.  
  
Duo... my brow creased trying to remember what it was that Duo was doing relationship wise. I had no idea. He still lived with his heart on his sleeve. Since the great love of his life died, Hilde, relationship wise one woman always filled the next one's place.  
  
Quatre, from when I had heard from him three months ago, was dating someone on and off. Laura, I think, was her name. He had become a defense minister for the Corps. Promoting peace along side Relena.  
  
I... I closed my eyes... and the image that haunted my dreams everytime I closed my eyes was there. I quickly opened them trying to think of just what was significant about what I now did. Forcing the image only to linger a few seconds before fading back into the far reaches of my mind. I never could rejoin the political or defense circle. I didn't want to. I traveled mostly with Catherine. We had long since left the circus, but we did form our own sideshow. I only had had one relationship since. It didn't last long. Only a few weeks. It wasn't her fault. It was mine. I closed my eyes again and waited for the image to come to me again. It didn't... I tried to will it to come, but it was like it only retreated further away. This image was what held me back and what got in the way of my relationship a few years back. Oppressive as it could be, it was also my greatest solace and comfort. My shelter. Just as if the very thoughts of my past relationship forced the image away, as if I was betraying it, the sheltering thoughts of it slowly made it return.  
  
Deep, violet eyes were framed by ebony locks of wavy-curly hair. Skin that was exotically dark and soft to the touch. Her face... her face was strangely beautiful. Not that her features themselves were extraordinary, just somehow perfect only on her. She spoke in a slightly accented voice. Soft and gentle. I wanted to reach out and touch her. But I knew I couldn't. I opened my eyes. Who was she? Was she one of the things that the government had tried to force out of my mind by wiping my memory clean? I groaned at the thought of it. It was one of the greatest mysteries to all of us. Just before we were forced into battle again, all five of us Gundam pilots and Relena Peacecraft were ordered, and in Wufei's caseforced, into having some part of our memory erased. Naturally, after they erased the memory, they couldn't tell us what it was about. All they could tell us was the stranger facts of the situations. Some I had learned on my own and when I heard the techs talking among themselves about our conditions afterwards.  
  
They were erasing the memories of a phenomenon that has baffled everyone else for years. After our battle with the mobile dolls, after Quatre had mastered the Zero system, we had returned to the Peacemillion, but apparently some soft of cosmic shockwave erupted and lasted for two minutes. In that time period all five of us pilots and Relena had gone missing from all thermal scans for two minutes as well.  
  
Then we were back on the scanners. However, because periodic checkups in the infirmary were a must for us, it was found that somehow our bodies, all six of us, had aged two years. From talks with Sally later after our memories were erased, all of us seemed to think we had been some place else. They opted a few months later for us to get some portion of our memories erased for us. Some of us from what I remember didn't care, Wufei and Duo fell into that area, Relena and Heero did so with reluctance but without fighting the procedure, but from what I had overheard and found out myself, Quatre and I were both defiant of it, and fought the system stealing whatever parts of out lives it was taking. They told us each of us to think about something pleasant, something we loved dearly, while it went on, but apparently Quatre and mine's choice of pleasure was in direct defiance of what the machine was trying to erase.  
  
They told us the machine didn't really erase the memories,only deadened them to our conscious mind. They also told us that if we willed and desired the memories to come back, to remember them hard enough, we would. I was not a religious person, but every night for years now since they erased my memory, I prayed to remember what it was they took from me. I needed to remember it. "Please, I beg of you, let me remember," I heard my voice say aloud. I closed my eyes. Her image was more clear to me now.   
  
Somewhere in my mind I could almost feel how her skin felt against my own, how her lips tasted when we kissed. I could feel her hands running along my spine. How I felt when with this person. I didn't feel like I did when I had been with other women. When I was with the others I always felt like I was using them or vice versa – dirty; that it was wrong. I had a moral sense, and somehow it violated it. I didn't love these women, and I knew they didn't love me. And me being with them just made it feel wrong. But with this person who I only saw, felt, and knew as perhaps nothing more than my imagination, I didn't feel that way. Something told me with her it wasn't wrong. I knew I loved her, somehow, somewhere, someway, I loved her, and she loved me. It was for this reason I felt that I had to remember my lost past. Not the past of my living nightmares and blood red skies red with the blood of the enemy, of the people who died on both sides, but somehow in that stolen past. Somehow I knew the answer I sought to my question, "Is she real or just a figment of a lonely man's dream?" lay in those memories.  
  
Passionately I cried out again," Please let me remember. Please. Even if it be just in my dreams, let me remember. Please."  
  
I turned over on my other side and clutched the pillow tightly – please, somehow let me remember... I need to remember, please – I thought as finally the sleep that had been evading me for hours suddenly claimed my senses, and somehow I knew tonight my prayers would be answered... 


End file.
